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The secret to traveling with kids, says a globe-trotting dad, is to overwhelm them with
something TV can’t give them: authenticity. BY MARK
HOROWITZ
Trevi Fountain, What was I thinking? I decided
to take my 11-year-old daughter, Eleanor, to The rare pleasures and frequent miseries associated with raising children are compounded—I’d say geometrically—when you travel with them. For one thing, kids are lazy, and my kind of tourism requires a lot of walking. Kids also have terrible taste. If it were up to them, all roads would lead to Disney World or a Best Western with room service, a heated pool, and easy access to a mall. Forget eating in decent restaurants: The only things that will pass their lips are French fries and buttered pasta. The worst thing is that while you’re traveling, your hands are tied. It’s tough disciplining kids under the best of circumstances, but no parent likes to have an audience of uncomprehending foreigners watch while he screams at a small child. It looks bad. Most families avoid these problems by skipping ambitious destinations and
settling for a self-contained beach resort, where the food may be lousy but the
kids can run amok. Or they throw in the towel and go to Disney World. But what
if you want to really travel? Like a real outdoor adventure in the Modern children are over stimulated anyway—by television, video games,
music, and movies—so the best way to get their attention is to overload their
imaginations. Take them to visually dramatic places like In Eleanor surprised me. She seemed genuinely affected by the
antiquity around her, and she reveled in the buzzing street life, the liberated
Roman teenagers zipping around on Vespas. She walked for miles, never
complaining, because if we didn’t walk, she might have missed something. We
took long, leisurely lunch breaks at exquisite small restaurants, where I
filled her with spicy pastas, rich desserts, and gelato. It worked. She began
to have strong opinions about Borromini’s architecture, and didn’t once ask to
go to the McDonald’s she spotted across from the Pantheon. Halfway through the
trip, we were sitting at an outdoor table eating bucatini all’amatriciana. “You
don’t do the things that regular tourists do,” she said. “You do things that
Romans do.” She was wrong, of course. We were the perfect tourists. But I loved
her for thinking it. From the Fall 2003 edition of the New York Family Guide |
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